Pique N Your Interest

Vancouver's downtown eastside encounters "Olympic effect"

After tussling three large guys in a Hummer for a parking spot
at the bottom of Hornby, in which tempers cool after a car pulls away opening
up a second spot, I discover I have no change for the meter. You’re lucky, I
grumble to one of the guys, I was just about to spank you.

That would have made a lovely start to the day, he says with a
disarming smile.

Although he looks expensive he doesn’t have extra change either
so after I get turned away from a haughty hair salon I hoof it to the corner. A
furry, graying homeless guy pleads for change as I glance in all directions
except at him looking for a bank. Listen buddy, I think to myself, you’ve got
more change in your groddy hat on the pavement than I do in this $250 designer
bag.

It’s a surreal Vancouver moment, one I drift through but don’t
expand on after the YMCA breaks my $5 bill and I stride past the homeless guy,
his hand still out. What is it in me that does not want to care about a man
obviously in longer term need than myself?

It’s an attitude David Eby encounters all the time. A lawyer
for Pivot Legal Society, a group that advocates for residents of Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside, Eby says Vancouver, a city once known as more socially aware
than other Canadian cities, is turning away from its responsibilities. He cites
the proposed Carroll Street greenway, a dedicated pathway through Gastown for
cruise ship tourists, as an example.

“So they can walk down this nice green pathway and not see the
squalor of the Downtown Eastside.”

Eby is one of the lead authors of Pivot’s recently released
report
Cracks in the Foundation, Solving the housing crisis in Canada’s
poorest neighbourhood
. In it he says the
“Olympic effect” is contributing to a potential 3,000 homeless on Vancouver
streets by 2010. He says although one of the key promises during the Olympic
bid process was to promote development of the Downtown Eastside without
displacing its traditional residents yet improving their lifestyle, in reality
the Games are having the opposite effect.

“And what we see now with three years left to go before the
Games is the reality of that promise on the ground and the progress towards
implementing that promise is negligible,” he said.

As with Expo 86 and Calgary’s 1988 Winter Games, low-income
housing is disappearing as residential hotel owners evict tenants in order to
renovate the hotels to turn them into high end condos or to attract
international students with deeper pockets. In the past few months five hotels
have closed, eliminating 415 rooms affordable to those living on social
assistance. And the city of Vancouver can’t and doesn’t seem to want to replace
the rooms.

Eby says the end result is there will be more homeless on
Vancouver’s streets.

“We’re on pace for a real disaster,” he said.

Not only are homeless people more expensive to take care of in
terms of social service infrastructures, Eby says having more people on the
street will take its toll on tourism. “Because who wants to come to a city
that’s in the middle of a homelessness crisis where people are getting
panhandled all the time?”

Eby says we also need to consider the effects on the people who
are displaced from the rundown buildings that they nevertheless call home.

“Hard as it is to imagine there are communities in these
buildings — many people have lived here for 15, 20 years. Their friends are in
these buildings, services they rely on are within walking distance — how they
survive is by being in these buildings.”

Pivot’s report boils down to one recommendation: Vancouver
needs more money for low-income housing. Otherwise those begging on the street
may well outnumber those of us reluctant to part with change.